The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

“The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” (SoTL) generally refers to the scholarly study of effective pedagogical practice at the post-secondary level. The activities of SoTL involve teachers at college or university investigating their own classroom practices, identifying successes and failures, and devising a plan to improve teaching by connecting educational theories and practices. The SoTL community publishes academic journals and hosts conferences. I learned most about the movement through the work of Ernest Boyer and Lee Shulman. Initially, it was not taken as a serious academic discipline, but the movement has developed a fairly strong set of scientific principles and research practices that guide the student-centered teaching ideologies in higher education. Part of their sophisticated work includes investigating pedagogical practice within discipline specific expertise. Regarding the discipline specific expertise, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A Guide for Scientists, Engineers, and Mathematicians presents itself as a guidebook for STEM faculty who venture into research on STEM teaching and learning.

The book offers 10 chapters. The first chapters (0 and 1) provide background information on SoTL, including a history and rationale of the movement and its implications for STEM educational issues. Chapter 2 provides a taxonomy of SoTL questions, such as what works, what is, and what could be as useful tools to frame teaching as research. Chapters 3 through 7 provide information and insight on the design issues relevant to STEM educational studies. These chapters provide substantive and highly technical bits of information (e.g., data collection, surveys, interviews, rubrics, coding methods), applicable to all those who are relatively new to conducting educational research in STEM contexts. In particular, Chapter 7 introduces a method for qualitative data collection and analysis (i.e., coding) with useful examples for people relatively new to qualitative research methods. The information is balanced and comprehensive, but inevitably misses some detail. That is not a necessarily bad thing, especially if the information is mainly a gateway to the next level. Chapters 8 and 9 discuss the issues arising from publishing the research and promoting the value of SoTL to administrators, peers and students.

The book clearly is not a collection of individual research papers under a similar theme. Instead, the three authors have carefully organized their knowledge of SoTL in STEM contexts (probably gained mostly from their own experience of SoTL in STEM through the Carnegie Scholarly and Professional Societies Program). Talk about getting it straight from the horse’s mouth: the authors are mathematicians and a chemist who are willing to improve their teaching. This works quite well for readers who regularly conduct research in STEM areas and seek to hear first-hand experiences of their peers in studying one’s own teaching practices.

This book could be highly useful as a text for a SoTL community involving and designed to benefit STEM faculty. There are also hundreds of programs for Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) in the U.S., and many of us are teaching in the program, and this book could serve as an important resource for students’ capstone projects.

Woong Lim (woonglim@unm.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at University of New Mexico. His research interests include mathematics teacher education; and discourse, language, and equity in the mathematics classroom.